JetBlue Airways and two airport security screeners at Kennedy International Airport have paid $240,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by an Iraqi passenger who said he was discriminated against because the T-shirt he was wearing bore Arabic writing, according to court records.
The passenger, Raed Jarrar, 30, an activist and lobbyist who holds a U.S. green card and lives in Washington, D.C., said he was told to cover his shirt and forced to sit in the back of the plane on the Aug. 12, 2006, flight.
The American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union in August 2007 filed the case in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York.
When he arrived at Kennedy for a flight to Oakland, Calif., Jarrar wore a shirt that said, in Arabic and English, "We Will Not Be Silent," a reference to a nonviolent resistance movement in Nazi Germany that has been adopted by anti-war activists in the United States.
One of the officials told Jarrar that wearing a shirt with Arabic writing was like "going to a bank while wearing a T-shirt that says, 'I am a robber,'" Jarrar said yesterday.
Reached by phone, one of the defendants, Franco Trotter, now a security screening manager at Orlando International Airport, declined to comment. The other screener, Garfield Harris, a supervisory transportation security inspector at Kennedy, could not be reached.
JetBlue said in a statement that it "continues to deny, outright, every critical aspect of Mr. Jarrar's version of events."
Jarrar, a former architect who moved from Baghdad to the United States in 2005, said he now works as a lobbyist for the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee, trying to forge connections between Congress and the Iraqi parliament and pushing to end the occupation of Iraq.
About his experience, Jarrar said, "We are dealing with a mentality of discriminating against Arabs and Muslims and treating them as if they were criminals."
Jarrar said the settlement sends a message "that discriminating against Arabs and Muslims is wrong and is illegal."
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